Lest I end the evening (or the month) with a negative review, let’s talk about that other television franchise over which I’m thoroughly gaga: CSI!

I may have mentioned this at some point here at the lair, but a while ago I found a great eBay auction on a large lot of CSI novels (I think I ended up with the first 10 novels; I could be wrong on that count, but I’m too lazy to get up and check) for a relatively low price. It was low enough, in fact, that I decided that even if I hated every single novel, it was still worth the cost.

Of course, we all know the deal by now: I bought them, received them, stacked them, and promptly moved on to other books. However, I decided one of these novels would be the perfect length for at least one leg of our recent Hawaii adventure…and I was right! I was able to finish this one during the flight from the islands to LAX. Perfect timing!

So Double Dealer, written by Max Allan Collins, is the first of the Las Vegas CSI novels. I’ve mentioned Collins here before; he was the author of three of the CSI graphic novels I’ve reviewed here. From what I wrote previously, I found his writing skills to be mostly entertaining, but I found that his stories didn’t really push the boundaries of the CSI fictional world in ways similar to how the Trek novel writers often pushed that franchise’s “accepted” boundaries. Of this, I wrote:

One thing that I